EMC makes great products. That is an absolute fact. But EMC, like all the other OEM's must upgrade you every 3 or 4 years. The easiest way to motivate you into a upgrade is to increase your monthly maintenance costs for CLARiiON until it is simply cheaper to upgrade than to pay the outrageous maintenance fee's!!

SMS offers a great alternative to CLARiiON owners who want to keep their current CLARiiON, but don't want to be gouged by overpriced EMC or DELL maintenance. SMS offers nationwide, responsive, support for the EMC CLARiiON.

Whether you own the largest EMC CLARiiON CX3 model 80 or the smaller AX150 or AX150i, SMS can provide you with a cost effective support solution. If you own the older EMC Clariion CX200, CX300, CX500, CX600,  CX700, FC4700 or  FC4500, and FC 5700, SMS can provide you with a cost effective solution.

Launched in 1994, the CLARiiON disk array had many interesting features that are now standard in the data storage and computing industry. Features included optional hot swapping, guide rails for proper electrical contact, and a method to lock the drives in place once they were secured in the disk enclosure. Other notable features include industry's first dual active controller design, mirrored write cache, full system redundancy and hot repair.

The CLARiiON line was soon extended to contain SCSI disk arrays ranging from 7 to 30 slots. In 1997, the CLARiiON included an emerging standard - Fiber Channel. The FC5000 array utilized a Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop connection that doubled the performance of SCSI arrays at that time. It was also the first to use RAID level 5 on Fiber Channel drives.

From this point on, the CLARiiON range grew into a faster, more expandable midrange storage platform, culminating in the FC5700. When EMC acquired Data General, significant development of a new range of CLARiiON arrays took place, resulting in the FC4500 and FC4700.

Within a couple of years, the first CX series of CLARiiONs (CX200, CX400 and CX600) was developed. Subsequent processor and bandwidth upgrades led to a new CX lineup (CX300, CX500, CX700) and a low end SATA based CLARiiON array, the AX100 (now updated to AX150). In 2003, CLARiiON became the industry's first NEBS-certified storage system.

In May 2006, EMC introduced the third generation of CLARiiON, named CX3 UltraScale. The lineup, consisting of the CX3-20, CX3-40 and CX3-80, was the industry's only storage platform to leverage end-to-end 4Gb/s Fibre Channel and PCI-Express technologies. Later in 2007, the line was expanded to include a new entry-level storage system, the CX3-10.